Scripts Quotations | Page 8

Most scripts are bad. I read a lot of them.

There's a script, then you're going to shoot the script and then you cut that and then that's the end of the film. And that's never really been how I've seen it.

All directors make films in individual ways. But the classical kind of view of filmmaking is that you have a script and it's very linear.

Sometimes you read a script and it's like, "You'll improv and this is just a blueprint of what the scene could be," and that's never a good sign. And it's never encouraging as an actor to take that on, really.

It is easier to port a shell than a shell script.

To this day, I get rewrite offers where they say: 'We feel this script needs work with character, dialogue, plot and tone,' and when you ask what's left, they say: 'Well, the typing is very good.'

I don't know how I absorb things, but I do. I just absorb them. I don't over read the script, and I don't really ever spend much time learning it.

I wanted to put a reference to masturbation in one of the scripts for the Sandman. It was immediately cut by the editor [Karen Berger]. She told me, "There's no masturbation in the DC Universe." To which my reaction was, "Well, that explains a lot about the DC Universe.

I won't work on anyone's else's script. I won't write for anyone else. I write my own stuff and make that when the time is right.

It`s the only time my education has come in remotely handy. -on using her Russian literature studies for copying her "Van Helsing" script into Russian to acquire a Slavic accent.

Even with revivals, I dont really pay attention to previous incarnations. I always just go with the script and with the director and am willing to treat it as brand new.

In writing scripts now, having made a film, I'm much more conscious of what it means to shoot and edit a movie, and that affects the writing.

Scripts [are] kind of a bare bones type of reading material.

When I read a film script, I kind of see it in my head and I see the moments that shape what I understand the character to be. There's very little time for rehearsal.

Wait a minute, words in the prompter, script on my desk, vending machine upstairs out of Funyuns... the writers are back!

I'm working in a form of cinema that can be described, and has been described, as a diaristic form of cinema. In other words, with material from my own life. I walk through life with my camera, and occasionally I film. I never think about scripts, never think about films, making films.

When you're working on a script, every word that's on the page, somebody has to read it. Make every word count in your stories.

My scripts are always filled with notes. I like to just analyze everything from the point of view of the whole picture, of the movie, my whole picture.

What I learned is that I should probably read a screenplay every once in a while before I said 'yes'. You could make bad film out of a good script, but you're never going to make a good film out of a bad script.

When you start out as an actor, you read a script thinking of it at its best. But that's not usually the case in general, and usually what you have to do is you have to read a script and think of it at its worst. You read it going, "OK, how bad could this be?" first and foremost. You cannot make a good film out of a bad script. You can make a bad film out of a good script, but you can't make a good film out of a bad script.

One reads many scripts, and some of them are good and some of them are not, but every now and then, one really grabs you. You simply can't put it down.

But I've always been hard to cast, I've never been an ingenue, I've never been the romantic lead. I'm an actor; give me the script and I do what I do and hope it's good.

I end up improvising in almost everything to some degree, 'cause it's often necessary on movies. The script is one thing, and it's this kind of theory of what you're going to do, and then you get there on the day and you realize, "Oh, the script is not appropriate to this room, the door's over here."

A script is like a theory of a movie.

You can have a great script, and it can be a great show, but for whatever reason, it just doesn't take the public's interest.

I was concerned about doing a sequel and repeating myself. That was before I read the script.

I screen tested for Training Day many years ago, which was David Ayer's script with Antoine Fuqua directing.

I love horror films, so I guess it's one of those things where I find myself interested in the script.

When you audition for things, there's pressure to go in there with a complete performance, and it's kind of unfair because, if you get it, you'll have rehearsal and talk about it, and you'll have plenty of time with the script. So, for me, I really do feel like an audition is a sketch of what you might do.

The script is what you`ve dreamed up-this is what it should be. The film is what you end up with.

All of my films have been very hard to understand at the script stage because they're very different. At the time I did them they were not conventional. The executives could only think in terms of what they'd already seen. It's hard for them to think in terms of what has never been done before.

A lot of the time the film chooses me. I'll be working and I'll get a call from my agent and I'll get the script and then tell him what I think.

It's a shame, but every time I get something scientific in the script, I read up to find out what I'm talking about - but then I'm on to the next script and it's forgotten.

If I ever wrote a script myself, it would be strongly emotional material.

Universal rushed us. We started shooting without a script that was totally completed.

There are so many scripts and they are fantastic. I think I would like to do something different, maybe something smaller.

I've never read a script that I've loved equally and differently to the book.

When I read the script for Will & Grace in 1998, I knew I was the only guy for the part.

To find a script that works with provocative ideas is hard to find.

You see a lot of good ideas or well-written scripts that are bad ideas.

When I got the script for Memento, I read it and I got killed off on page one and I fired my agent.

I mark a script like an exam, and I try not to do anything under 50 per cent. Similarly with the part. And also film is a peculiar thing, parts don't necessarily read in script form anything like as well as they can do when it comes to materialising.

My springboard is always the script. Even if the script is taken from a novel, I often haven't read the novel... .

Inspired music arises from an inspired movie which arises from an inspired script.

But when you get to know a character so well, you start to have insights that you can't show because you're confined to your script of your hit show.

What I mostly do is take the script, analyse the hell out of it, see what's in there, see what kind of person I'm dealing with, and then forget I'm playing a father and just play a person who exemplifies all those things.

In the 90's action pictures were all the rage. As a woman, I was fed up with them and I initially thought that the script was just another action film dressed up as a period piece.

I've always been better at informing the audience through images than through words, but I took on a script that was so dialogue-intensive, that the words had to do all the informing.

I'm basically a writer, it's who I am. I direct and I like theatre directing very much. But I've done 17 movies, they don't say 'Let's get Garry, he'll make a helicopter shot,' they say 'Get Garry, he'll fix the script.'

I, of course, wanted to do something with Drew Barrymore. Please. So we were reading scripts back and forth and then we found this script, Fever Pitch.

It's all about the script. Reality is key to me and less cutesy.

When Tim asked me to do Frankenweenie, he had his original sketches from before he did the short, of what Sparky looked like, and he drew Victor and some of the other crucial people. The remarkable thing about working with Tim is that, once he's read a script, he sketches out everybody else.

If I put the script down more than once, there's a good chance that I probably don't want to play the part.

I was meeting a lot of directors and reading scripts, and I was like, "Well, I'd love to play this part," but I couldn't.

The devil's script sells you the heart of a blackbird.

I love this script [The Hollars] because I'm lucky enough to come from a really tightknit family.

Richard Jenkins read the script [The Hollars] and really liked it, but he said, 'If you can get Margo Martindale, I'll do it. Otherwise, good luck.

If you have a script that's not great, if you have a great director, you can make a great movie, but if you have a great script with a director who's not good, never are you going to have a good movie.

Let's make movies, not deals. Let's write movies, not scripts.

In an ideal world the script is written lean and tight and therefore there are no scenes left on the cuttring room floor and therefore no extended edition.

Everything is in a script for a reason, and only by being part of a writing team (or writing it yourself), do you really understand the intention of every beat.

I'm much happier just to write myself out of the script entirely...

When I read [the script] and saw that it was my fanboy wet dream of an Avengers script and that [Agent] Coulson was a big part of it, that was the great day for me. I just drove around the streets with the script in the other seat, giggling.

The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn't.

Every screenwriter worthy of the name has already directed his film when he has written his script.

I've never played a manipulative, drug-smuggling lesbian before. For me, it's pushing me in an area that's great. There are days when I'd read the script and I'd be like, "Oh, God, I can't believe I have to do that."

To sit down at a computer every day and write a script is commendable. I don't have the patience for it, but I have some fantastic ideas.

I made a point to not read too far ahead with the first six or seven episodes of any show. I would read the outlines, but I didn't really want to read scripts too far in advance because I didn't really want to get ahead of myself, at all. To be honest, I don't have the time to come up with theories.

When what's around you - such as scripts, or like me being on the show and playing 18, now me doing this film playing 18 - it's kind of been what's been there for me.

Sometimes you do a film because the script is amazing, sometimes you do it because you get to work with amazing people, and sometimes you do a film because they pay you money.

It was a great circumstance when I received the script of [Chloe] and Atom [Egoyan] said he wanted me to do it. I was inclined to say 'yes' immediately.

Making a movie is like making an ocean voyage, and the script is your ship.

If you just read Joseph Campbell, who has written amazing books on mythology and religion, they all do come together at some point. There are some of the greatest stories that there have ever been in the Bible. All you have to do is read the book of Maccabi, it's like a film script.

Being in front of the camera, you never got to see the whole process from the conception of the script all the way through to the filming process.

Every time you get a script and you have a scene, you start mining out how many layers there are within it.

I'm sure great scripts are hard to find, but I'm definitely open, and waiting to see what comes my way.

What happens is things come to you - director, script - and if you respond to it, it's because it's tapping into some part of what's inside you, and different roles tap into different parts.

If it's a terrible script, it's a terrible bore.

If it's an excellent script, I enjoy it tremendously, the acting part of it.

A script is utterly useless in and of itself; it's only of any worth the minute your actors, your designers, your directors come into being.

I feel like I work on scripts for comedy as well as dramatic stuff the same.

In my early 20s, I didn't even know what the Groundlings was. I had no idea. But I know how to break down a script and work on the character.

If you want to be a filmmaker, ask yourself if you could imagine doing any other job. If you can, that’s a script!

And remember how he wrote the first Rocky in a few days, and wouldn't sell the script even though he was starving, because they wanted to put somebody else in the lead role. To see what he's accomplished, dog, that's what it's all about.

I don't really have a structured path of wanting to say, "This is what I'll do next." I'm just going to read a bunch of scripts and see which one I love. There are so many things I would love to play, in all different genres.

The script comes first. If that isn't good enough, you know it's gonna be a long ride.

Films that rely on their cast to be funny are often episodic and feel like a series of loosely connected sketches rather than a satisfyingly structured script.

I've always tried to stay away from playing Jews. I get like 20 Holocaust scripts a month, but I hate the genre.

I stick to the script, I memorize the lines, cause life is movie that I've seen too many times.

It fills me with dismay sometimes when you look at the scripts that do come to you that are primarily focused on violence. There are so many other things to play around with.

People kept passing our [ with Robert Ben Garant] script around, and suddenly we had this reputation as screenwriters, which we're not - we're sketch comedy guys.

I had never really done something that was more of a horror film, and its funny, because those are the kind of movies that I like probably more than any other genre. The script had images in it that I liked.

You just have to go with a good story and a script that you like and people that you like to work with.

TV feels quite constipated, and the thing I find particularly difficult is the branding of the channels where it's not 'Is it a good script?' but 'Is it a BBC2 script?'

Different directors have different things, so when I left Mike Leigh, as it were, and I went into other projects after 'All or Nothing,' it took some getting used to - what do you mean there's a script?!?' That kind of thing.

I can't remember what my first script was.

As a director, my job is to protect. I protect scripts, actors, cameramen, designers.

I created the characters from what I read in the script. I decided how I should talk, accent, no accent, my own voice, or a created voice. Then, I visualize what I should look like.

The only thing that gets me back to directing is good scripts.

The key is, if youre not monkeying around with the script, then everything usually goes pretty well.